Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Eva is a recipient of the 2017 International Journalism Award for International Reporting, granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club (founded in 1951), the first recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism, and was short-listed in 2017 for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Now based in Russia, she has been put on the Ukraine regime's deathlist for her coverage of the Donbas, where she focuses mainly on the plight of civilians caught up in this cruel and unnecessary war.
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Welcome to The Delingpod with me, James Delingpod, and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
But before I introduce her, a quick word about some of our sponsors.
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I am so excited, I really am, to have you back on the podcast.
It's quite difficult pinning you down because you're a busy girl.
I mean, you're often heading off to the front line to do insanely brave things.
Oh, well, you caught me at a quiet time.
Well, that's good.
It's good to see you back in the comfort of your... would you call that a dacha that you live in?
You know, it is in a region of dachas and technically it is a dacha, but people do live here full time around in this district as well.
So it's my home for now.
I'm renting it and it's fine for me.
But yeah, technically a dacha.
Now, when I talked about your bravery, I was not using that word lightly.
You've been to the Donbass, the front line of this horrible, horrible war.
Is it eight times now?
Nine times now.
First time in September 2019, and then another eight times from March until April this year.
Well, I'm obviously going to ask you for your insights into what is really going on over there.
As you know, the stuff we get in the West, in the Western media... I think it's a joke that we use Soviet-era Pravda as an example of the antithesis of our own free and frank and fearless media, when actually we've got something at least as bad as Soviet-era Pravda over here.
We just get nothing but wall-to-wall, three-letter agency propaganda.
Absolutely.
I might forget this point later, so I'll make it now.
I'm sure you're aware of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's state-funded media, nonetheless.
At some point mid-summer last year, independent media in Canada contacted CBC and other main Western corporate media to say, hey, we've just learned there's a Canadian, me, I've been on there since my first visit to Donbass in 2019.
And, you know, whatever.
It is what it is.
It's a horrible list.
There's over 300 children on it.
And, you know, it has been a list in which people whose names have been put on there have been killed, presumably by Ukrainian intelligence, notably Ukrainian journalists, dissidents, and citizens, normal people.
Anyway, so this media contacted CBC and said, like, you know, we're concerned.
We want to raise the alarm.
You know, Canada's so concerned about, especially about female journalists, right?
CBC did contact me about a week later, but not in, not with any mention of the kill list, Mira Dvorets.
Instead, they said, you know, they wanted to talk to me about my reporting and my participation in a war crimes tribunal in Moscow.
I didn't take the bait because having been smeared by Western corporate media since 2016, I'm well aware of their tactics.
They never want to have a frank and honest conversation.
They cherry pick at best.
And distort your words.
So I just simply didn't take the bait.
They came out with a really disgusting production, including this scary music to depict what an evil person I am and, you know, all the things that they said about me for Syria, they're saying about me for my reporting about civilians and the sufferings of civilians from the Donbass.
And what's very interesting about this, that piece they came out with is not, okay, so they wanted to implicate me as being like a war crimes denier, a genocide denier, you know, all these terms that they're directing towards Russia for defending its It's own sovereignty and civilians in the Dunbass But moreover, they drew directly from my entry on Miratorets.
And the reason I know that is because I did participate in a tribunal on Ukrainian war crimes back in March last year in Moscow.
And it was organized by Maxim Grigorin, an independent Russian researcher who's done fantastic research in Syria, now in the Donbass.
I participated and I spoke about what I'd seen at that point, bearing in mind this was March last year and I've seen a lot more since.
of Ukraine's war crimes.
And the interesting thing about the CBC publication or smear piece on me is that they stated it was in April and it wasn't.
There was maybe another one in April, but I participated in the March one.
They have a screenshot from the link where the whole meeting was aired.
So I can't remember which Russian site.
And if you go to that site, which I did, you can clarify that indeed it took place in March, I think March 11th or something like that.
They said it was in April.
And where did they get that information from the Mirat Forrest entry on me?
So not only did they come to the Completely ignore any mention of a Canadian journalist being put on a kill list simply for the crime of reporting from a side that Canada doesn't want to shed light on.
But they also drew from that kill list to do their smear on me.
Now, the other point I wanted to make about that is I don't feel in the climate of Canada right now that I could go back safely.
I would potentially risk being thrown in jail.
I believe the Canadian government, which supports the Nazis in Ukraine and has done so since the illegal coup in 2014 and has armed them and is very aware of that they're arming Nazi elements in Ukraine.
I believe the government, and I'm sure you're very well aware, James, that like, I think it was in 2021, forgive my dates if I'm wrong, when the Freedom Convoy was going on in Canada.
And supporters of that convoy that were simply saying, we want to work without having to be forced to take the vaccine.
Supporters of that convoy had their bank accounts shut down.
So, you know, there's the risk, a mild risk of having my bank account shut down.
We're already closed it.
So that doesn't matter now.
But I think this government could actually say, well, this is a genocide denier, war crimes, apologists, et cetera, et cetera, which I'm not.
I expose Ukrainian war crimes and throw me in jail.
Or worse, by flagging my name to CBC listeners, which might include some of the large population of extremists that support the Banderites in Ukraine.
If I were to go back to Canada, I don't feel I would be safe and I don't feel the government or security services would protect me.
Yes.
Am I right in thinking that Canada has got the highest population of Ukrainians outside Ukraine?
I believe that's correct, and I would highly recommend it.
There's a couple of excellent articles talking about the history of Canada and the Banderites.
There's one by Thierry Maison, and I believe it is actually called Canada and the Banderites, or something like that.
And it can give you more specific numbers on how big this population is and how Powerful, the Ukrainian lobby is in Canada.
And there's another article now, unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the authors, but I can send you the link.
And it talks about our Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland herself, and her grandfather, working as a Nazi propagandist, a grandfather of whom she's very proud.
And when in February 2022, Russia commenced the what it calls it special military operation, Freeland was seen in a protest, I don't remember which city, whether Ottawa or Toronto, holding one of the Nazi flags, one of the Banderite flags, a UPA flag, I believe it was.
So, I mean, there are, back to your question, amongst Canadian citizens, there are Ukrainian Canadians, some of whom, not all of whom, of course, hold these extremist ideologies.
And then amongst the politicians, we have Chrystia Freeland, who's Deputy PM Yeah, doesn't that make you feel comfortable?
I've got to ask you actually, even before we go on, that given the way that we in the West have been propagandised, and I've made myself very unpopular at parties doing this, I've had people laugh in my face when I just try and explain a few Very simple facts about this current war.
I talk about the people being burned alive in Odessa, for example.
And I think in most cases what I find is that they look at me like I'm mad.
That this is kind of crazy Russian, it's always Putin propaganda.
All I'm doing is regurgitating Putin propaganda.
And these people, to a man, would consider somebody like you to be a Putin apologist.
You're a propagandist and you're some kind of rogue journalist who for whatever crazy reason has gone out to shill for the evil Russians.
How would you... is there anything you can say to respond to that?
I mean...
You say they regurgitate these talking points and they're literally regurgitating CIA talking points, right?
I mean, I'm sure they throw in conspiracy theorists as well.
Or MI6 in this country's case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So as for, you know, myself being called those things, I've been called every name in the book for beginning in Syria.
Like I said, I think I mentioned since late 2016, smeared by Western corporate media, smeared by politicians, called every name Assad propagandist, Assad apologist, Kremlin stooge, Syrian stooge, you know, all the names that you can think of, they don't affect me because I know I'm reporting honestly.
And the focus of my reporting in Syria, in Palestine, in the Donbass has always been, with very few exceptions, to interview civilians who are affected by the wars that the West has created and continues to stoke.
That's the focus.
So going to places that are being shelled, in the case of the Donbass, by Ukrainian forces, with mostly, most often with Western weapons, interviewing people who have been interviewed or unfortunately documenting the dead.
And over the course of last year, I would have seen three or four dozen dead, mangled bodies, body parts littered in the streets.
You know, as you mentioned at the beginning, you're not hearing about these things in the West because our Western media won't cover it.
I was literally seeing the body parts and smelling the stench of dead bodies.
And that's what I do.
That's what I report.
I go somewhere.
I don't go somewhere with a cherry-picked narrative.
And I want to add a point to that in a moment.
I go somewhere.
When something happens, I report it.
Maybe I go somewhere and I have an idea of something I want to report on.
For example, the reconstruction in Mariupol or the issue of the water disruption in the Donbass because Ukraine has attacked water facilities.
So people were literally, myself included, hauling water in five liter jugs in order simply to be able to clean yourself or clean, you know, whatever, bathe, flush a toilet.
The water situation was very critical over the course of last year.
So there were times when I would go to the Donbass and I had something in mind that I wanted to investigate or I wanted to interview people about, but if something happened, then that was my focus.
So like in September of last year, I mentioned, I'm sorry to go on about this, but I think it needs to be said in September of last year, in the space of five days, 26 civilians were torn apart in central Donetsk, not a military area.
There were no military targets there.
These were city streets.
There was a market, right next to a market, or a trolley bus or a streetcar, whatever you want to call it, was going by.
A Ukrainian shell hit that bus, burning it out, and two people inside were killed.
Four more people splayed on the ground, body parts all around.
That was just on one day.
Another day, 13 people were killed, and it was just a horrific scene.
And that was my focus when I was there, was documenting that.
Or in late July, when Ukraine fired missiles containing over 300 tiny mines, like the size of a lighter or a tube of lipstick or whatever, petal mines, Lipostok in Russian.
And these mines are so tiny and their design is such that they glide to the ground and most of the time do not detonate until they've stepped on, until somebody handles them.
And who will handle them if they don't know better children or maybe elderly who don't see well or don't understand what they are.
Until now, 128 civilians have been maimed by these mines, including 11 children, and three have been killed as a result of their injuries.
And these mines were littered in the center of Donetsk, in parks, around apartment buildings, in the outskirts as well, the suburbs of Donetsk.
And they're still affecting people now because they're very hard to detect, even if an area has been cleared.
If the mine, for example, had initially landed in a tree or on a rooftop and it's windy or it rains, it can shift positions and then suddenly an area that has been deemed safe is now not safe.
So, I mean, these are the types of things, amongst many others, that I'm reporting on.
And I do not get any talking points from the Kremlin.
When I contribute articles to RT, it's after I've already gone to a place and after I've already done my own videos for my Telegram channel, for YouTube, for wherever I want to publish it.
And then I pitch to RT.
I say, Hey, I'd like to write about this.
Will you take it?
They don't always say yes.
And it's not a matter of censorship.
It's just, you know how media works.
Sometimes if something is not newsly, it's not timely.
It's just not worth being in the media.
I don't like that aspect of media, but in any case, it's me who says, I want to write this.
I get no directives from anyone on what to write, you know?
So this whole nonsense that You're a Kremlin apologist, or Kremlin stooge, or any of these silly names they make up to terrify people from talking, from having an opinion, from doing research, from sharing the research of other people.
That's the intent of these names, right?
It's just to shut you up.
They have no basis in reality, in terms of my own reporting, because I'm reporting what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing.
And also, I'd just like to note that, you know, it's not just yourself and myself and people who either have spent a lot of time in the region or done a lot of research on the region.
You also have, like, I'm sure Colonel Douglas MacGregor, an American patriot, who I don't remember how many years he served, but he certainly is an intelligent man.
He's been doing excellent commentary and analysis on the situation in Ukraine and Donbass and Russia in general.
I'm sure they've called him a Kremlin suit and Putin apologist, you know?
Scott Ritter the same, like anybody who voices opinion will be called that.
So I think back to what you're saying, like, I don't need to tell you, I know you're a strong-spirited person, but anybody listening, you know, if you're getting called these comments for doing research and having a discussion with somebody and trying to open someone's mind, you know, don't be stirred by it.
If the person is intentionally calling you that, then I suppose the only thing is they're probably not going to change their opinion or their tactic, but it doesn't mean that, you know, By virtue of what you're reporting, that you are what they're calling you.
It's just a very childish slur.
I've probably asked you this before, but I think it was 2021 when we last... In fact, I was looking at our old email exchanges and it was really interesting.
It captured the mood of a period which we've almost blanked from our memories, where you and I were wondering, and I'm sure everyone was at the time, whether this was the end of our freedoms already.
It was like it felt everything was going to be closed down.
We were never going to be let out of our lockdowns again.
I mean, I think we've been granted a temporary reprieve.
Maybe we'll talk about that later on.
But what I wanted to ask you was, was there ever a time in your life when you thought, as I used to think, that the West were the goodies?
I'm always very honest about the fact that my political awakening didn't happen until my late 20s.
So I went until that point being not a bad person, not a mean person, but a very naive and gullible and ignorant person.
So I suppose at that point I probably thought, yeah, I live in a good country.
Canada is a great place to live.
You know, my government supports us.
We have, you know, I probably thought all the stuff that most Westerners think about their own countries.
I was never like extremely like, like over the top.
My country is the best in the world type of thing.
But I probably thought some, some of the basic things that we're told to believe about our countries.
Um, but that started to change after I first went to Palestine and saw the horrible realities, uh, that Palestinians live under occupation.
And then, uh, after, uh, eight months in the West Bank and then a subsequent three years in Gaza, becoming intimately familiar, not only with those horrible realities and, uh, you know, war and white phosphorus and point blank assassinations, all that done by the Israelis against Palestinian civilians, But then about how the media would just completely whitewash it.
And then I grew to see, after going to Syria 15 times since 2014, the same thing.
And that's when I started to understand, OK, wait.
I'm still learning, of course.
I have a lot to learn.
But that's when I started to kind of connect the dots and realize, OK, the West always purports to be free and democratic.
And back to what you're saying at the very beginning, only in the West can you have free and open media, supposedly.
They purport all these things, but having spent a lot of time in the East, I see that, no, absolutely not.
That's not the truth.
I mean, if the West are the goodies, why do they continually foment wars?
Why do they fund, literally fund, Al-Qaeda?
Why do they whitewash the crimes of Al-Qaeda?
The BBC, if you remember, what year was that?
I don't remember the year.
Maybe, let's say 2015, maybe earlier.
If you remember, the BBC humanized a man named Abu Saqr.
There was a dead Syrian soldier, and he put his hand into the chest of the soldier and took out an organ.
Some say it was a lung, some say it was a heart, and bit into it.
You know, a horrible act.
Cannibalism meant to, I guess, terrorize and install fear in people's hearts.
And the BBC interviewed him, and they basically said, oh, you poor thing.
Something terrible must have happened to you.
Please tell us about this horrible regime that drove you to such an act.
We know you're a good person kind of thing.
You know, it's just like the media knows no, um, there's no depth they won't stoop to, uh, in order to cover up the crimes, uh, that are being, um, either committed by the West or allowed and enabled and, um, supported by the West.
I watched this fascinating interview, you may have seen it, with Tucker Carlson and Douglas MacGregor and it was, I mean it was terrifying, terrifying in its implications that the US has spent trillions of dollars on this war.
And the figures that McGregor gave, he reckoned that around 400,000 Ukrainians had been killed, as against, I think he said, about 50,000 Russians?
Might have been 40,000.
40,000.
Because I remember it was like a tenfold Yeah, ten Ukrainians for every one Russian soldier.
I think, probably like me, you're thinking, I don't want any of these people to die.
I certainly don't want young, terrified, disabled or sick, these days, Ukrainian conscripts dragged from their homes to be sent out into the meat grinder.
I don't want them to die.
I don't want the Russians to die.
And yet this war grinds on, propped up, I think, by By NATO.
Yeah, and if I may also, that's a sentiment, the not wanting people to die or suffer, that's a sentiment I've heard from people in the line of fire in Donbass.
You know, you ask them, at least in my experience when I've asked them something like, and I try to keep the questions kind of general, just like, do you have any friends in Ukraine?
Do you hate Ukrainians?
And everybody I've asked some rendition of that question to are like, no, we have no problem with Ukrainians.
You know, we always used to travel there.
Some went to school there, some summer vacationed wherever, you know, in different areas of Ukraine.
And they always, the people I've spoken to have said, like, especially even before when I said my focus is almost exclusively been the suffering of civilians, there was one time where I did go to frontline and interview commanders of one of the Donbass brigades.
And I asked them the question as well, and they also said the same thing, like, we don't hate Ukrainians, you know, same thing.
The only thing they said is, we want soldiers, go home.
This is the commanders that said that.
They just said, idu dom, go home.
And they're very aware, they can discern, just like in my experience, Syrians as well, they can discern between your average American, your average Ukrainian, And the powers they're pushing and funding this war, you know, or these wars rather.
So I think it's important to emphasize, at least in my experience, both in the Donbass and here in Moscow.
Last, when I talked to people about the situation, I have not seen the hatred that Russians are depicted as being hateful.
I haven't seen that.
I've seen People being concerned about the war, excuse me, about both sides, but also being aware of why this is happening.
And I think the other thing Western commentators refuse to acknowledge is that Russia was facing and is facing an existential threat.
That is something you'll find Colonel Douglas MacGregor saying.
And all these people who said Russia started this war in 2022, again, they always omit the previous eight years.
And you'll have people like McGregor, or there was a few great articles by, what was his name, the Swiss former intelligence.
Jacques Poe.
Yeah, he did some great articles that were republished in English, and he laid out the chronology of events, including the increase of Ukraine's shelling of the Donbass prior to February 24th, when Russia started its special military operation.
And he also laid out the fact, you know, that again, something Western commentators conveniently ignore is the the Minsk Accords, which which Russia was pushing both sides to adhere to, and which we learned sometime last year, Merkel, Macron, Holland, they all said, well, we never intended to adhere to them.
We were just buying Ukraine time to build up its military and that was effective, wasn't it?
So I've kind of gone astray from your question, but I just wanted to make that point about I haven't seen the hatred.
I'm sure there are people here that hate Ukrainians, but In my experience, I haven't seen widespread.
But then... Oh, you were talking about, yeah, not wanting people to die.
You know, I had... My Telegram channel kind of grew a little bit over the course of last year.
Maybe because I was reporting from the Donbass and people wanted first-hand information.
For whatever reason, it grew.
But at some point, I had to close my comments section.
Not because I want to be like a tyrant and not allow freedom of speech, but I got sick of hearing, in general it was mostly Westerners I would see doing it, saying, you just need to bomb the hell out of Kiev, you just need to destroy Kiev, you need to kill every Ukrainian.
I don't want to hear that.
Nobody wants to hear that.
Who the hell are you, pardon my language, but who are you to be saying such horrible things?
Are you sitting far from a front line?
Are you sitting far from the mangled bodies, making these horrible comments, calling for death?
Nobody wants death.
Russia did everything to avoid this, you know?
And again, it's not just me sitting in Moscow Oblast saying it.
You have these American patriots like McGregor, or you have Jacques Bode also saying that, and many, many more people who've just simply done the research, saying this was an avoidable war.
And even when Russia offered, you know, a peace agreement, Scott Ritter was making that point in a recent interview.
He was like, President Putin was far more generous than I would have been, you know?
So it's just it's back to your question.
Yeah, it's it's this all could have been avoided and nobody wants to see death.
Nobody except the war profiteers in the West.
So just for people coming to this fresh, who don't know what to think about the war, just give me very briefly the potted history of the run-up to the war.
Why Russia went into Ukraine?
Well, in brief, we have the coup in 2014.
You mentioned some of the horrific events around that time, like the Odessa massacre, of at least 48 civilians burned alive in the Trade Center in Odessa.
Not only burned alive, some were point-blank assassinated.
Really horrific scenes at that time.
But by whom?
Who was killing these people and why?
That's the thing.
Now, at the time, my impression was it was... I didn't actually have a clear impression.
It was allowed by the Ukrainian government.
It was allowed by the new coup government.
In any case, extreme nationalists, let's say, Ukrainian nationalists, supporting the nationalist ideology, supporting this Banderite Nazi ideology.
And when I went to the Donbass in September 2019, And spoke with civilians there, of course, through the help of a translator.
I would ask them very simple questions like, you know, who's bombing you?
Because I wanted to hear what their opinion was, you know, and they were like, of course, we know it's Ukraine.
They've been bombing us since 2014.
And I always, I still ask them this question over the course of last year into this year.
Why is Ukraine bombing you?
Often they'll say, well, they don't consider us human because we're ethnic Russians.
Well, if you follow some of these Ukrainian telegram channels, you'll see That is the mindset of some Ukrainians.
They don't consider Russians humans.
They have all sorts of names for Russians and believe they should be killed.
But I would also ask them, you know, what did you want?
In 2014, you wanted to break away.
The West called them breakaway republics.
The people I spoke with said, including at the time I did interview some soldiers in the Donbass militias, and they said, you know, we just didn't want what was happening in Kiev and Odessa.
We are Russian and we knew we'd be persecuted.
We wanted to be able to speak our language without being persecuted.
So that was from at least the people I've spoken with and then reading on that since, Initially, I believe most of the people in the Donbass just wanted to be free, far away from what was happening, the extreme nationalism and rise of Nazism in the rest of Ukraine.
And so they wanted to be independent.
Russia didn't recognize their independence until February last year.
So for all the people that say, oh, well, Russia shouldn't have invaded in 2014, well, they didn't.
There were perhaps Russian volunteers, people who I met one of them, who had already done his military service, who was no longer an active member of the Russian military, who went in his own capacity to the Donbass to volunteer.
And at the time when I asked him in 2019, you know, why did you decide to come here?
And as he put it, defend the Donbass, he said, well, first of all, these are my people.
But also, I don't want what's happening here to come to Russia.
And I think that's a sentiment of many people who support, you know, fighting for the security and future of the people of the Donbass.
So over the course of eight years, you know, we had the Minsk Accords, which basically prohibited the use of heavy weapons.
And there were a bunch of guidelines which Ukraine violated.
And there was actually the, what was the acronym of the European monitors?
Oh, oh, oh, I forget the name, OSCC or something like that.
The four letter acronym for the monitors who were supposed to monitor ceasefire violations on either side.
And at the time in 2019, when I went, I went to this one village, Gorlovka, which is, sorry, Gorlovka is a city, I went to this, the village of Zaitsevo, and the woman there, like the town head said, they'd never known peace since 2014.
She said, none of the peace agreements reached them, that Ukraine was shelling on a nearly daily basis.
I saw, at that time, I saw a house that had been hit a day or two prior that was still smoldering after burning out.
She basically described the Ukrainian forces as destroying the houses, house by house, street by street.
So that's just one example, you know, of an area that was under Ukrainian fire all the time, but this was going on for eight years.
And then, as I mentioned earlier, referring to the Jack Boe article, in February prior to Russia launching its special military operation, Uh, now he lays out in that article how Russia had intel that Ukraine was planning to launch a massive, excuse me, offensive against the Donbass.
And at that point, uh, Russia, for whatever many reasons, um, decided, okay, well, the peace route hasn't worked and, uh, we're going to, I mean, I think it would be best for people to listen to President Putin's speech because I don't want to misquote him, but basically All avenues to reaching a peaceful solution had been not met by Ukraine and the West and Russia decided it was time to intervene.
Which is just ironic because again the West claims that Russia intervened in 2014 and if anyone was intervening it was the West that continued to arm Ukraine and whitewash their crimes.
How is the war going?
I mean, you've been to the front line.
What's it like?
What do you see?
Well, I want to correct you there.
I mentioned I've been to a front line to interview some commanders in one of the battalions.
But most of my reporting has been from areas under Ukrainian shelling.
So if you want front line reporting, there's certainly a number of excellent Russian reporters.
Patrick Lancaster does a lot of front line reporting as well.
My focus is more civilians.
There are a couple of reasons for that.
I lacked the language skills.
I'm getting better in Russian now, but when I first started going there, I didn't speak any.
There's not a whole lot you can do.
I mean, you can take a translator, but I think I wasn't equipped in terms of having... Until this year, I wasn't equipped with having body armor or stuff like that.
I never had it in Palestine or Syria.
In terms of what I saw when I went to the front line, well, I mean, I saw soldiers that are living a very difficult life, not a luxurious life by any means, of course, but they, when I would ask them, what is their motivation?
Why are they fighting?
It's again, I think it's so similar in pretty well every case, at least that I've a place that I've been to.
When you're defending your homeland, then it's not a question of luxury or whether you defend or not.
It's a question of your existence.
But in terms of what it's like, what it shouldn't be like, Donetsk is a city that is not on the front lines.
And yet, over the course of last year, as I said to you, going there every month, I actually had to look and remind myself, The chronology of when I was there, so in April, in March I went there with the Ministry of Defence delegation and I think it's important to mention that it was two days.
What was interesting about that visit is that we visited areas that had been recently liberated in both the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republic.
And so there we were seeing Russian humanitarian aid being given out, and I know how the West framed that.
They framed it as, oh, this is just, you know, staging, blah, blah, blah.
I saw people who were very grateful for that aid.
One of the places we went to, a city named Volnovakha, is about halfway between Donetsk and Mariupol, and it was, I don't want to say it was completely destroyed, nor, in contrast to what the Western corporate media say, was Mariupol badly damaged.
You could say some areas, not all areas, But what was interesting about Volnavakha, we saw the main hospital, which had been pretty much destroyed.
The chief physician there told us Ukrainian forces had occupied the hospital and had mined the ICU before leaving.
And when I went back on subsequent visits, I met some other staff who told me before any Russian forces entered Volnovakha, Ukrainian forces were firing in the hospital.
And this was a common theme that we heard from Mary Opal.
That Ukrainian forces were occupying residential buildings and were also firing upon residential buildings for whatever reason, probably mostly to incriminate Russia.
Maybe also a sense of sadism.
I don't know all their motivations, but it's well documented they did this in many areas that they occupied.
So it was interesting to go back to Volnovakha later and see, you know, it wasn't this one chief physician who claimed this, but Other employees in the hospital.
One thing I wanted to mention earlier is that in going in March on this Ministry of Defense delegation, there were two French mainstream channels that were on that delegation, so it wasn't only so-called Kremlin stooges.
They saw and heard everything I saw, but they omitted everything I saw and heard.
We went to the site of a March 14th massive, it's called a Tachka-U missile, which contains Uh, what's it called?
Cluster bombs, cluster munitions.
And on March 14th in 2022, Ukraine had fired at the Stochka U and air defense had, um, had intercepted some of the clusters, but not all.
21 civilians were killed and this was the center of Donetsk.
So we went to that site, there were photographs still up.
It was like when we were there, it was maybe two weeks later.
So you could see the impact of where the, the bomblets had landed.
You could see the photos of the people at the time, grief-stricken people.
And we heard from Denis Pushulin also, who spoke of that day, who spoke of the eight years of the war.
We went to the various liberated areas.
We also spoke to, I'm blanking on his name, the head of the Lugansk People's Republic.
These people, these two French channels, they included none of that.
The only thing they said was, this is what Russia wants us to see in terms of the humanitarian aid.
So, you know, in terms of like Western reporting, they'll often say, and I saw this with Syria, there's many parallels between reporting on Syria and reporting on Donbass or Ukraine proper.
They'll often say like, well, we can't report because we're not allowed to go there.
But in the case that they are enabled to go there, they're given visas or they're taken, in this case, on a delegation to see and talk with people, they just don't report honestly because it doesn't fit their narrative.
So that's that one visit, but you look like you wanted to make a point there.
Well, that's really interesting because you've raised a point there that I find really puzzling, which is As somebody who spent his life, most of his working life, as a journalist.
I used to think that the war correspondents were the coolest of the cool.
These were people who, they were nobody's bitch.
They just went out there to try and find out the truth and they were fearless and they lived on the edge but ultimately what they wanted to get out at whatever cost was the truth of what was happening.
And yet, I read some of the reports That that you see in the in the UK media the mainstream media.
And it reads to me like the purest propaganda and I'm I'm thinking on what level are these people aware that they are lying?
On behalf of the forces pushing the Western war effort, how much are they conscious of what they're doing?
I would wager most of them are very aware and very conscious.
You mentioned Syria and also something more recent from my April visit to the Donbass, People's Republic, or it's now Donbass, a part of Russia.
But in terms of Syria, both in my reporting and my dear friend and colleague, Vanessa Beely, who sends her best wishes to you, by the way, we were very well aware of many instances which Western journalists were in Syria.
They had their pre-scripted narrative.
They completely ignored what they saw around them.
And so they chose willfully to continue with their prescriptive narrative.
There's one example, Lise Doucet, BBC, April 2014, my first visit to Syria.
Terrorists occupying eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus, shelled as they were doing all the time.
They were constantly shelling Damascus, civilian areas.
They shelled a school in the old city.
They killed one child and injured over 60.
I went with others to the French Hospital, which was treating many of the children.
I took some footage, I tried to get their names, tried to show the civilian suffering, which is usually what I try to do.
Lisa Say was there.
She was asked by someone, are you going to tell the truth?
She nodded her head and said yes.
Her later article, which was titled, weirdly, Russian Roulette or something, said, quote, something like, the regime says it was rebels in Eastern Ghouta, but locals believe it was the regime.
And I use the regime in quotations, of course.
I don't call it the regime.
It's the Syrian government.
Sorry.
But she knew very well.
I mean, you spend any time there and, you know, she was free to walk around.
And the terrorists in Eastern Ghouta were shelling us all the time.
It was a matter of, really, I suppose roulette is appropriate in that regard, it was a matter of luck that you weren't shelled.
And so she knew very well, you talk to a local and they'll be like, yeah, they've been shelling us for years.
Just like in Donbass, you ask a local, as I did, who's shelling you?
Is it Russia, as the media claims?
And they'll be like, no, of course it's Ukraine.
So she knew very well, that's one example, there are many many examples of, you know, Vanessa collaborated with this Syrian journalist Rafik Lutif in the making of the documentary The Veto, in which they describe an incident, I forget what year, it might be 2012, in Homs, in which various Western mainstream media outlets come together to stage an event that never happened to incriminate the Syrian government.
That's one example.
I had an example, yes, from April this year.
So I went with journalist Crystal Niant.
She lives in the DPR in Donetsk.
She's been there for over six years, I believe.
She speaks fluent Russian.
And we were interviewing people from Bakhmut or Artyomovsk.
And these people were talking about how they had been shelled by Ukraine relentlessly.
They said they were being shelled by Ukraine, and the media was blaming it on Russia, and there were no Russian forces within the region that could have shelled them.
They weren't anywhere near.
And they said, many of them said to us, they saw Ukrainian and Western journals.
They knew they were Western because they were speaking foreign languages.
They claimed that these journalists were Giving money to the Ukrainian forces to shell their buildings and then filming it to then say this is Russians doing it.
Now, this is their claim, but it was more than one person, and they were interviewed independently.
I don't believe that they were given talking points.
To me, they sounded very credible, and knowing how vitriolic and without morals some Western corporate media journalist can be, I believe it's totally plausible.
That is... That is so... How do these people sleep at night?
I don't know.
I don't know.
So, you know, back to the whole name-calling, I don't claim to be perfect.
Sometimes I scramble to remember dates or facts, but I know I'm being honest, and that's why I have no problem with my own conscience, because I know I'm being honest.
I could work harder, maybe, you know, but in terms of how I'm reporting, I'm completely confident in my integrity.
How they can report, how they can knowingly lie, how they can cherry pick facts, how they can whitewash heinous crimes that they're aware of.
I don't understand that.
There was that German journalist, Udoff, I'm sure you know who I mean.
I don't remember his last name.
He used to write for one of the main German papers, and he came out with a book at some point, maybe 2014, talking about how he was Effectively lying in exchange for perks and benefits.
So I'd heard that interview.
He had an interview in RT.
But then more recently, I came across some excerpt of an article he wrote and he was talking about his first foray into like war correspondent.
I don't know if he was in Iraq or where he was, but he talked about it.
It's really interesting.
You should try to find it.
He talked about being with other journalists and seeing them all fill up like jerry cans full of Gas.
Petrol.
And he thought, oh, that's smart.
If we break down in the desert, then we're good to go.
That wasn't the intent.
He said they basically lit fires and staged scenes of some sort of bombing or whatever.
A catastrophe.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
For me, it's incomprehensible, but I do believe that many journalists have the incentive to do these things.
Wow.
I guess I'm pretty naive.
Before I forget, and this is a bit of a sidetrack, we'll come back in a minute, but I'm speaking to you the day after Prigozhin, allegedly, they claim the borders are so burned that they can't identify them, that Prigozhin, the head of the First I want to say I'm not much prone to speculation because we don't have, you know, any of the facts.
His plane's been brought down with his entourage.
What do you understand as the story behind all that? - First, I wanna say I'm not much prone to speculation because we don't have any of the facts.
We have what's been said.
And then there's multiple conflicting reports.
The Russian, let's see, whatever the aviation body has said, his name was on the list of passengers.
So we have that.
We have that the plane went down.
We don't have confirmation that he actually got on the plane or stayed on the plane or whatever.
So there's that.
There's that caveat.
I know a lot of people who say, no, he's definitely dead.
I don't know.
I'm just not going to speculate that he's alive or dead.
But people, I know some people who are saying that he's dead, or it must have been President Putin, because two months prior, Pugoshin staged a coup.
And now, my own thought about the coup, I don't have all the facts about that.
I don't believe it was an actual attempted coup.
It's illogical to think so.
I mean, you know, coming from the South, going all the way to Moscow, how many kilometers, Over a thousand more kilometers.
At any point, Russia, the Russian government and military could have easily stopped that.
I remember one analyst pointing out like for 12 hours, the Russian government was slow to react, which is, you know, not something you wouldn't lapse like that if you really believed it was a perceived threat.
There were various theories about why that coup wasn't allowed to happen.
One was that it would enable the Russian military to reposition in areas around Voronezh and Like further north from the south, which makes sense.
But anyway, in any case, I don't believe it was an actual attempted coup.
Plus, whatever you think of Prigozhin, I don't believe he's a stupid man.
And you'd have to be mentally retarded, excuse me, and not very intelligent to think that you could storm Moscow and be successful.
So if you do believe it was a real attempted coup, though, then one of the logic that I don't agree with is that the president has decided that he was, Progogian was misbehaving and had to be dealt with.
I personally don't believe that.
What's happening right now?
The BRICS summit is happening right now.
And why would, you know, if Russia wanted to take care of him, whatever, at least they might have chosen a time prior to or later, not during the BRICS.
You know, it's just like it's it's it's illogical to me.
And I just don't I don't see I think the president's pretty rational.
I don't see it being something he would need to do.
Some people are saying like he doesn't forgive betrayal and that's why... I don't know.
I think there's too much... We just don't have all the facts and now I'm speculating and I just said I think it's pointless to speculate but these are theories people are putting out and I just don't agree with them.
Eva, can I just say I'm so glad that you said that because that has been my response to when I first heard about the coup.
I thought, well, everything that comes out of Ukraine, of that conflict, is misinformation, disinformation.
How do you say it?
Maskarovka?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think you said it correctly.
Because I'm inclined to just on the grounds of plausibility, I'm inclined to agree with you that it was much more likely to be about disguising troop movements than it was about a coup.
Because I looked at the maps, as you did, and I thought that is a very, very long road to Moscow.
I've done the route so many, I've done the route, well, nine times since, well, let's say eight times since last year and then once in 2019.
You know, and, like, if you take a train, if you're lucky, you can catch a train from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don that is around 16 hours.
You know?
That's the train.
If you're driving, maybe you could do it faster, but then you have all the toll booths that, you know, you have a lot of obstacles in the way.
It's not very plausible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Which inclines me to think that it was, again, this is pure speculation, that it's more likely to be a Western assassination than a Yeah.
Just to sort of put a, you know, throw a stone at everyone's nest.
I think, yeah, that aligns with the who benefits question that we should always be asking, right?
And in my mind, Russia doesn't in any way benefit from that, even if people want to say that the President had a grudge.
I don't believe so.
I think he's a very rational person.
Actually, Scott Ritter, again, I'm not like his secretary or anything, but he's made some good points lately.
He was talking about an interview with Soloviev, a media personality here, who was talking about President Putin's personality and how to, I don't want to misquote, but basically how everything he does, it's in contrast to how Western leadership behave, where it's all about ratings and how people are going to perceive your actions.
He was saying, the president thinks of the country first.
And so even if you want to have this theory that, you know, what's happened was some sort of revenge, which I don't I don't believe at all.
It doesn't align with with with the president.
I'm not, I'm explaining this badly, but you know, it doesn't align with his character and motivations, I would say.
We can't know, of course, so again, speculation, but I think it makes more sense that who would want to have this man who represented a very effective military group, who would want to have him taken out?
Well, Western intelligence.
Plus, it would be like seen as destabilizing Russia, right?
And the West always wants to do that.
Yes.
I mean, I'm not a Putin fanboy by any stretch, but I do get the strong feeling that the version of Putin we're sold in the West is a misleading one.
It's a sort of caricature.
I mean, people get castigated.
Whenever anyone in the West says, well, I'd rather have a leader like Putin than any of our lot that they're they're accused of being a kind of you know kremlin kremlin stooge whatever but actually i don't get the impression from his decision making that he is as you as you say he's he's not led by he well he doesn't need to does he he doesn't No.
He doesn't need to get voted in, really.
It's not like he's trying to impress people with PR campaigns like Rishi Sunak or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
But the big debate I find in sort of awake circles, I think most people who are awake, actually not all, but probably about two-thirds, are aware of what's really going on in Ukraine.
But the big dividing point is, is Putin actually a goodie or is he just another facet of the evil elite that's taking over the world and wants to destroy us all?
Is he as bad as the US deep state?
Have you got a view on that?
I do.
I mean, I don't want to get too much into that, but that is not my belief for many reasons.
And again, it has nothing to do with the fact that I contribute to RT.
I guess I should make that clear.
No, I just inherently don't believe that.
I believe there could be elements within the Russian government that are affiliated with, you know, this globalist ideology.
He's President Putin has come out with some very strong worded speeches, deliberately naming globalists.
And again, I think people should go back to his speech around February 24th or whenever that he made a very powerful speech around the time of the commencement of the special military operation.
I think that the argument that some of the woke people put forth about Russia being a part of this globalist agenda, it doesn't make sense to me because Russia has fought so hard to preserve its cultural integrity, you know, and also to keep some of this craziness you know, and also to keep some of this craziness that is infested in the West out of Russia.
You know, I just inherently don't believe that.
And another thing I would really recommend, there are people who've looked into the tech side of things far more than I ever could.
So one argument I've heard is, well, why is this happening?
Why are certain tech things happening?
And a rational explanation I've heard is, well, they're going to happen whether or not you like it, whether or not the President of Russia likes it.
Certain technical advances are going to happen.
Are they going to be used in the same way as, say, the Western global elites would like to use it?
You know?
And I don't believe so.
Yes, certainly.
The sort of, the pro-Putin camp says, yeah, look, he's standing up for Christian values, for family values, for tradition, yadda yadda yadda.
And the anti-faction, and there's a few bloggers who specialise in this, who purport to be from the middle ground, who are just looking at it objectively.
And what they all say is, look at his behaviour during the fake pandemic.
Look at these kill shots, these evil vaccines were forced, were imposed on the Russian military, that he is no good guy, he's just as bad.
Maybe you can correct me on that?
Well, I think I know who you're referring to without naming the person.
I remember that person was claiming all of the, what was the number of the conscripts, conscripted military, reservists?
I forget the number now.
Was it 30,000?
No, it was more than that.
200,000?
Whatever.
Whatever the number was.
He was at one point claiming they were all forced to get the shot.
I spoke with people who had been called up and asked them and they said no.
And I remember also looking into it, I'd have to dig into what are the sources, but he actually, that same person went back and retracted, not as a result of me, as a result of what other people had said, correcting him.
He did retract his claim that they were being forced to get it.
Now, whether prior to that, I can't really speak to whether or not military were forced to get it, but I do know that I spoke to people who had recently joined or been called up and they said no, that absolutely wasn't the truth.
That's one thing.
And that person has a variety of media they can rely on to fit their narrative.
I'm not really equipped because, as I said, yeah, I'm starting to understand a lot more Russian.
I can read it slowly.
I can speak it like a two-year-old.
But I'm not equipped.
I'm not that familiar yet with all the media sources and who's funding them, which Western NED or other body is funding them, where they're getting their motivations from.
So I can't sit down.
Plus, I have other things I want to focus on.
I can't sit down and dissect every post the person makes.
But I feel like they're cherry-picking to suit their narrative.
Who knows?
I could be totally wrong.
It's possible.
But I don't trust the information they're putting out.
And talking of imponderables that we can only speculate on, a couple of years ago I was really mustard keen to have Gonzalo Lira on the podcast.
And now I'm thinking...
Meh.
I don't think that he could be detained by... What's the Ukrainian security people called?
SBU.
The SBU.
Who are like the Gestapo, aren't they?
I mean, they're pretty... They're not lovely.
And for him to be detained and then released... I mean, I don't want him to die at all, but I'm thinking... Am I right to be suspicious here?
I will, again, begin with a caveat.
The things I'm going to say are my own thoughts.
When they're not my own thoughts, I'll refer to whoever I heard them from or agree with.
But I had my doubts about him.
And I also, like you, of course, wish him no ill.
I hope that he's safe.
If he is in detention, I hope he's released and not tortured.
When he disappeared last year, I was among the people very strongly advocating for him.
He and I had communicated prior to that.
In fact, a day or two prior to his disappearance, I don't remember, I'd have to look at my messages, we had communicated and then he disappeared.
I went on RT advocating for his release.
I used my own platforms to advocate first release.
When he was released, I was coming back from Mariupol that day.
That's an aside.
But basically, I had no Internet because at the time now now there's Internet in Mariupol.
But at the time, outside of Donetsk, it was very sketchy.
So I was kind of out of the loop.
I remember coming back into Donetsk and seeing one of the media platforms that dealt with him a lot announcing, oh, Oh, we have an exclusive interview and then they had his first reappearance I found it strange how calm he was I'm a very calm person because I've faced a lot of day Okay, not always calm but in the face of danger.
I have a weird uncanny calm I don't know where it comes from.
It just is Which enables me to, like, be in places that are being bombed and keep my head about me.
But for somebody, I don't know how calm I would be if I had allegedly been detained by the SPU, which, as you noted, is not known for their benevolence or their nice treatment of its detainees.
It's noted for torture or disappearing people violently.
So I found it very strange how calm he was when he reappeared.
I found there was contradictions in his story.
For example, first, he couldn't discuss any element of his Detention other than the fact that he was detained and under house arrest, I believe he said.
Then some time later, he told the particular media platform he was being interviewed by.
He said, or in one of his YouTube videos, he said, oh, I sent all the documents to them.
They've seen it.
So I thought, well, that's weird because you've already said you can't discuss any of the details.
So sending your documents is literally not only discussing but sharing information you cannot share.
I found it strange that in Kharkov, of all places, where prior to his disappearance, he told me he was, OK, I don't want to say terrified, but he was scared.
He said, you know, the crazies are on the street.
You don't know who is who's one of them or not.
So in in the text that he was sending me, which I still have, he was scared.
So I found it very strange that after allegedly being detained by one of the most notorious intelligence services, he's given his devices back.
He claimed in one of his interviews First, he said they were taken from him.
Then he said, well, they were taken and my passwords were changed, so I no longer have access to my initial Telegram or Twitter.
But he was allowed to open new Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube, which just doesn't jive.
If he's being accused, which he apparently was being accused of being a Russian agent, why would he be allowed to have his devices, period, let alone open new platforms, gain tens of thousands of followers on each platform?
Do a streaming, continue to be critical of the government.
You're just not allowed to in Ukraine.
We know that.
It doesn't make any sense.
And not only do that for a short period, but for the next year.
And then after he did his stint to the border, I'm sorry, I am very skeptical.
It just, to me, it's illogical.
I know the explanation put forth is that He did those three 15 minute videos because he wanted everybody to know the exact details of his detention and alleged torture before he tried to do a runner to Hungary to seek asylum.
Okay, that's plausible.
But just an aside, in 2019, I went to Kiev, I think Feb 2019.
To interview the lawyer of Ukrainian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky, who was then being detained under pretrial detention.
He'd been in pretrial detention for, by the end of when he was actually released, it was over a year, maybe a year and a half.
And I was, like I've just said, I don't get scared very easily, but I was pretty terrified in 2019, before all this got even worse.
Of course, I knew there were Nazi elements in Ukraine.
I was terrified to be in Kiev.
I was there for three days.
I was looking over my shoulder everywhere I walked.
I didn't go out at night.
So I was, at that time, terrified.
Now, I know it's easy for us to say, in the comfort of our own homes, if I was in his position, I wouldn't have taken an hour to do three videos in whatever time it took him to set up, or whatever.
Talking in English, in an area that's not speaking English, most presumably, flagging attention to yourself, I would have gotten the hell out of there in whatever way I could have, or gone to the American Embassy, maybe, you know, in Kiev.
So I don't know.
The story doesn't line up.
Why was his ankle bracelet removed?
Why were his passport and other documents given back to him?
Why was he allowed to flee, travel two days or whatever it was on his motorcycle?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
So I don't know.
I'm not going to go as far as state he is some sort of intelligent asset.
I don't know that.
I just know it doesn't line up with the reality of what life is like in Ukraine.
Yeah, yeah.
I was... Oh, I'm sorry, James.
There was one other thing I do feel is relevant.
George Eliason, an American investigative journalist living in Lugansk since maybe 2012, maybe prior to that.
He's a very good investigative journalist and he did a couple of videos so people can listen to him if they want to.
On his YouTube, George Eliasson.
But in communicating with him in his video, if I'm not divulging anything he hasn't already made public, he stated that he spoke with two different journalists.
He didn't say who.
He didn't say where.
My assumption is they're in the region, either in Russia or in Ukraine or in the Donbass.
But I don't know that.
That's my assumption.
I could be wrong.
He stated these two journalists Lira was in contact with and was trying to get information.
I forget.
I believe it was their address.
Information that somebody should not be asking a journalist.
That's why I think they're in the region, because if they're in the States, they'd be a little bit safer.
What I can say is that after his initial reappearance last year, I did not follow his new Twitter account because I was extremely suspicious and skeptical of him.
And I frankly just didn't wish him ill, but didn't want anything to do with him.
And he spent a lot of effort trying to reel me in or get a hold of me.
I don't know.
He had people messaging me saying he said he couldn't DM me on Twitter because I didn't follow him.
My settings are such that he could have.
And random people who I don't follow were DMing me saying he wants to talk to you.
I wasn't interested.
He finally did start DMing me.
I didn't reply.
And he did say, why aren't you talking to me?
Where are you?
A rather large effort to get a hold of me and to get me on his roundtable.
I don't know why.
I mean, if I was blanking you, you'd probably say, oh, that's a shame.
Eva doesn't want to talk to me.
I guess I'll move on.
But he didn't do that.
So in light of what George Eliasson said, it does make me wonder why he felt this urgency to try to get a hold of me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
I used to do, until recently, a podcast with my old university friend, Toby Young, and whenever we got on to the topic of Ukraine, the conversation got very, very heated.
And the last time we talked about it, Toby went into what I can only describe as a rant about how evil Putin was and about how the Russians had committed so many atrocities against the Ukrainians and I was thinking well at the very least Tobes you must be aware or you ought to be aware that there have been atrocities committed by the Ukrainians as well.
Where are you on all that?
I cannot state whether individual soldiers in the Russian army have committed atrocities or not.
It's a possibility.
My belief and understanding is there's not a top-down directive to do so and in fact we see many, many, many, many, many instances of Russian soldiers either taking captive or receiving Ukrainian soldiers who've surrendered and treating them not only humanely but very humanely.
And I know Western People and your friend Toby would say, well, that's just Russian propaganda.
There are so many instances of it.
I don't believe it to be propaganda.
Maybe one or two videos are propaganda.
I believe it is just the way, again, the whole, he's not understanding that the Russians here still view Ukrainians as their brothers and sisters.
Yes, they're at war, but I can't speak to the ethics of each soldier or the management, the generals, but I believe there is a deep ingrained ethics that you treat.
Well, that was it really.
those who have surrendered or you've captured humanely.
We don't see that from the Ukrainian side.
Not every Ukrainian soldier, of course, but we have seen videos of Russian soldiers being mutilated and executed by Ukrainian forces.
So there's that.
Now I've gone astray from your question.
What was it again? - Well, that was it really.
I mean, I wanted to know about the atrocities being committed.
I mean, is it just the militias?
Is it Azov or is it across the board?
Definitely as of IDAR, there's other militias that are less well-known, but also Ukrainian forces committing the atrocities.
I would again refer people to George Elias, and he's visited mass graves in the Donbass that would have been dug by Ukrainian forces and these extremist militias.
But the thing is, the militias aren't independent, they're also integrated into the Ukrainian forces.
It's often hard to differentiate between them.
There are many testimonies from Mariupol of civilians talking, like, I guess we have to define atrocity.
Is atrocity Ukrainian forces firing on civilians as they try to flee?
I would say yes.
But if that's not atrocity enough, if we're only talking about mutilations and beheadings, well, yes, Ukrainian forces and these Nazi brigades have done that.
But I also think that, again, Well, now it's nine years of Ukraine bombing civilians in the Donbass is an atrocity that's been going on for nine years.
And, um, I know when we were chatting, I sent you some links, just, um, maybe you could share the one I wrote what I've seen of Ukraine's war crimes, uh, from 2019 until present.
I mentioned the pedal mines.
I mentioned 128.
Okay.
128 isn't a huge number, but you consider the potential any time of a child stepping on one of these mines or an animal.
or an elderly person, which has happened, and having their foot violently blown off.
I've seen some of the images after somebody stepped on one of these tiny mines.
It's horrific.
And you have all the NATO weapons.
The hotel I was in in August, and I'm not making this about myself, I'm making a point, on August 4th last year, I was in the Donbass Palace Hotel.
Most of the time when I went to the Donbass, when I go to the Donbass, I rent a simple flat because it's cheaper and it's, what's the word, not distinct.
Nobody would know where I'm renting, whereas the hotels are generally known to house journalists for the most part.
At that time I chose to be in the hotel to be near other journalists in case something happened so I could go with them because I don't have a car.
You know I have to rent my own taxi and so just easier logistically.
And on the morning of August 4th Ukrainian bombing started 200 meters from the hotel and the last two shells landed 50 meters away and then directly next to the hotel.
Killing a woman on the sidewalk and in the area killing five other civilians And that was with NATO weapons that was 155 millimeter NATO caliber weaponry and which I I've learned since are very Specific Like the the bombing got more closer to the hotel as as that the fifth one landed right next to the hotel I think it's within the realm of possibility that you the Ukrainian forces shelling Donetsk on that day knew there were journalists there.
I don't believe I was specifically being targeted, but I do believe it's possible that journalists, as well as civilians, of course, because that's the most important point is civilians are being targeted all the time by Ukrainian shelling.
But I do believe that was a possibility.
But I just had a couple more things I wanted to mention.
Like, you know, just as in Syria, there's so many parallels with the media reporting and lack of reporting, how they did in Syria, how they do regarding Ukraine's war crimes.
You know, over the course of the war on Syria, we would often hear reports of the Syrian regime or Russian forces bombing civilians in hospitals in Aleppo, for example.
There was the Ion Children's Hospital complex in Aleppo, which was taken over by various terrorist brigades over the course of, since 2012-13 onwards.
Um, and Aleppo was liberated in late 2016.
Um, and they, they were using these hospitals as headquarters.
They gutted them.
They were no longer functioning as hospitals.
They're functioning as terrorist headquarters.
And, uh, at least the Ion Children's Hospital had a dungeon below, a prison below with, um, solitary confinement cells where both, uh, Syrian soldiers and civilians were held and interrogated and tortured and eventually sometimes not always killed.
You know, so the media would report, well, the Syrian government regime, they'd say, or Russians, are bombing hospitals.
And in the case where that particular complex was bombed, it was a legitimate military target because it was a terrorist headquarter.
But you fast forward to, well, in Daraa, in southern Syria, before the city was completely liberated, I went there, I forget which year, 2018 or so, And it was being shelled by a terrorist and I went to the state hospital and it was very difficult to reach.
The taxi I was in had to gun it down like a hundred meters or so because there were terrorist snipers like a hundred meters off to, I guess it would have been the right, west or I'm not sure, I think it would have been the west.
And half the hospital was out of commission from terrorist bombing or the potential of terrorist sniping.
You know, but the media didn't care to talk about that hospital.
They didn't care when Ukrainian forces bombed a Donetsk maternity hospital in June last year.
I went there the morning after.
Thankfully, people weren't killed because they'd been sheltering in the basement due to the intensity of the bombing.
But, you know, that's a clear example of Ukraine targeting a hospital.
There are many other examples of Ukrainian forces targeting hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure.
Not a peep in the media.
How do you... I mean, you say that you're blessed with an extraordinary calm in danger.
How do you... How do you keep yourself together?
I mean... I don't think I can do that.
I think it was born out of necessity when I was living in Gaza.
At the time I was an activist and not a journalist, so I was blogging.
I did eventually start writing articles for inter-press services and eventually for Russia Today, but in the first years I was writing on my blog in Gaza.
And aside from documenting Israel's war in 2008-2009, which was horrific and the first time I saw war, and at that time no body armor whatsoever, and Gaza's a very small place, Really, everything was a potential target with F-16s overhead, Apaches, warships, tanks, you know, everything you can imagine.
Drones, drones everywhere.
The buzzing was horrific.
But aside from that, our work, the other activists and I were accompanying farmers on their land in northern and eastern Gaza, because even when they're like a kilometer away or 500 meters away from the fence that separates Gaza from the rest of Palestine, the Israeli forces fire on them.
We often came under fire, not rubber bullets, not gas, but live ammunition sniper fire.
They thankfully didn't kill us, but the intent was surely to frighten us because the bullets were literally whizzing past our heads and bodies.
You could hear them.
This happened over the course of the three years I did this on many, many occasions.
And I think it was during both my first experience with war and during those experiences with coming under Israeli sniper fire that my body It's not healthy, of course, psychologically, because really, you know, the fight or flight, right?
And so I wasn't fleeing.
I was literally standing there.
My body developed this calm.
I don't know if I had that as a child.
I don't know.
It just developed at some point.
I mean, do you have a faith?
Are you religious?
I'm not religious.
I respect people who are religious.
I just didn't grow up with religion.
But I don't know.
It sounds cheesy.
I do think something's looking out for me because there are many, many, many... I think they are.
Yeah, where it was very close.
And it's just, you look back and you think, damn, that was close.
Well, I think, you know, I think that's, that's even braver of you in a way, because, because I mean, if you're a Christian, you've got the consolation that, you know, you're going to go somewhere better.
But for you, you don't know that yet.
Well, yeah, I don't.
No, I mean, back to this though, I think it's important, you know, back to what we were saying at the very beginning, how those of us who have a different narrative, based most of the time in reality and our on-the-ground reporting or interviews, what people like Vanessa, myself, my colleagues who are doing this kind of reporting do, at least I'll speak for myself, and I think I can attribute this to Vanessa because I know her very well, It's because we're compelled to.
It's not out of career, you know, ambitions, aspirations.
I have no aspirations to be working for any media company.
I happen to contribute op-eds to RT and that's fine for me, but I'm also perfectly fine just having my little YouTube and Telegram channel.
So I don't have career aspirations.
I'm just glad to have platforms where I can share what I believe to be truth.
And I think that when you're driven by, at least I can say for myself, I'm driven by an urgency To expose as much of the war propaganda and also to share the voices who are being completely erased by corporate media.
I'm driven by that and also by the strong, having spent so much time in Syria and Palestine and now at the Donbass, a strong sense of just how wrong it is that these people are suffering so much and being killed and maimed and tortured for no reason other than these sadistic occupation or wars that have nothing a strong sense of just how wrong it is that these people are suffering so much and being killed and maimed and tortured for no reason other than these sadistic occupation or wars that So, and the hypocrisy, I really hate hypocrisy.
It's like, it pisses me off and it motivates me to work harder when I see one of these Western suits talking about their concern for whatever particular area or whatever, you know, particular leader is such an evil person.
Because you know very well that when they want to overthrow a government or at least throw the society into chaos, they have to vilify the leadership, they have to vilify the army.
So all these claims of Russian soldiers raping babies, yeah.
I'm sure you've heard that kind of stuff.
The woman behind it, I forget what her position in the Ukrainian government was, but she was fired because even that propaganda was too much even for Ukraine, surprisingly.
It's very interesting what you were saying about the truth.
Because I think that's going to strike a chord with a lot of people watching.
Because, like you, I get all sorts of accusations thrown at me that somehow I sort of shill for... that my business model is based on putting out the craziest story, the craziest conspiracy theories I can think of.
Or whatever, you know.
And you...
accused of being a Kremlin stooge or whatever and actually I think what unites all of us in the well it's the clues in the word the truth movement is that we place truth above all else we don't really care about the other things the material things and stuff I mean I mean it's nice I'd like a I'd like a like Deripaska's yacht with a crew I guess maybe But it's not essential, whereas the truth is absolutely essential to me.
I don't care where it... I'm not frightened.
It's clearly the same with you.
Yeah, and again, I want to thank you.
I hope I did last time we spoke, but, you know, thank you for having myself and other voices that are maybe not too popular on your show because, you know, you're giving your audience a chance to have a different view, whether or not they're going to believe what I say, it's up to them.
Always, you know, Do more research, corroborate whether what I'm saying jives with other people's reports, and if you don't like what I'm saying, that's fine.
I really don't care.
I mean, I'm not trying to be dismissive.
I don't mean I don't care in the sense like your opinion means nothing to me, people.
What I mean is, what I said before, I stand by what I say and what I write.
If I make an error, of course, I will correct myself, but in terms of the overriding messages I'm putting out, I stand by it, you know, and people think by calling names it's going to Stop voices from speaking out.
It won't.
Being put on a kill list didn't stop me from going back to the Dunbass.
And even if all the platforms I contribute articles to said, no, we don't want you anymore.
If I'm deplatformed on YouTube, OK, fine.
I'll just go back to blogging.
That's fine.
For me, it's just a compulsion from within.
So it's nice to have a bigger platform to reach more people.
But I'll still, in the end, do what I believe.
No, I can speak for like, again, I mean especially it's very interesting with you because you do have a background in working with corporate media, right?
So it's a very, you have an insight into that world and why would you leave, if you're about clicks and all this stuff that you're being accused of, why would you leave what I imagine was probably a very stable and secure job environment to do what you're currently doing?
Yeah, there was definitely more money in it and also there was a kind of, there was a A ready-built community of people that you thought were kindred spirits.
So, you know, you'd go to the spectator party and you'd talk to, every year, and you'd talk to all these journalists who you thought were like you, and they were your friends, and you would exchange gossip and stuff.
I must say, I really enjoyed being in the journalistic Mainstream.
So long as I wasn't aware of the truth.
But once I became aware of the truth, that it is basically a lie machine, I couldn't play anymore.
Simple as that.
But I didn't know at the time.
That's why I asked you that question about how much of those journalists are aware.
Because I'm not sure, maybe I would have been different then, but I don't like living a lie.
I've always No, I couldn't sleep at night if I had to do that.
So as soon as I discovered that it was wrong, I was out.
I mean, when I spoke with a journalist for Aware, I guess I'm referring to ones who go somewhere near the place they're either to the place they're writing about or near it.
I suppose it's fair to say there could be journalists who are writing, you know, from their offices and getting lines from Reuters or from You know, the various agencies and believing what they were taught in journalism school, whatever they were taught, you know, and believing that I'm sure there are journalists that are doing that and believing they're, they're following, you know, the ethics of whatever, you know, they were taught and might honestly believe everything they're writing.
I'm sure that's possible, but the ones that actually go to a site and see and just refuse to report what they've seen, they absolutely know they're lying.
And I don't, like yourself, I don't know how they can sleep or how they can live with themselves.
Unless, unless they truly believe themselves, and I also, this is a mentality I can't comprehend, unless they truly believe themselves to be superior to Syrians or Russians or whomever, Palestinians, you know, there are people that have this belief, I'm superior to this particular body or religion or whatever.
I don't understand that.
And it doesn't justify lying, but I suppose in their minds it could justify That's interesting.
I wanted to ask you because I was I was very very depressed after listening to the Douglas McGregor Tucker Tucker piece because McGregor I don't know whether he's being unduly hysterical here.
He thinks that once we reach the point where there are no Ukrainian conscripts left to be fed into the meat grinder, That NATO will move in and start sending our boys.
I mean, as you know, the American deep state is heavily invested in this, particularly Victoria Nuland, who seems to be leading American foreign policy, even though she's kind of, who elected her?
She's just the kind of apparatchik, isn't she, of the Biden presidency.
But that The military-industrial complex is so invested in war and Congress is a uniparty when it comes to voting for more money for more war and more weapons and more everything.
Where are you on where things are going?
Do you think it's going to end up with the Third World War with the West?
Or do you think there's going to be... Do you think that they're going to...
The attrition is going to be such that the Ukrainian army is going to be effectively wiped out before the West can move in.
And I don't know.
What do you think?
I would have to, I think, defer to McGregor and other analysts.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I have to say just simply, I don't know.
I think the people that are pushing this war are crazy enough to ratchet it up to that level.
But they also, I don't believe that they're crazy enough.
I don't believe, one thing I disagree with some analysts about, is I don't believe that the decision makers really truly believe that Russia is weak or Putin is weak.
As you know, as we've heard analysts say, like, oh well, they all, not the analysts, but the Western decision makers, the powers that be, they really believed Russia is weak.
And no, I don't believe so.
I think that's just a line they put out to dupe the public into supporting their wars and their whatever ambitions.
But I do believe they could be crazy enough to push things.
But and then, as others have pointed out, well, you know, Russia has already made clear their red lines.
Which would definitely be... Well, we already know there's Western... There's my other dog here.
I love your dogs.
They keep me relatively sane.
Well, they're lovely.
Yeah, I know.
They're sweethearts.
So I've kind of lost my train of thought somehow here.
Of course.
I don't know.
I hope it doesn't come to that.
But it's really hard to say these days.
It's really... Who knows?
Yeah, well I guess I'm going to have to bite the bullet and do the Douglas MacGregor interview.
Although, I mean, it gets very hard when you're the parent of boys who would be cannon fodder for this, for the meat grinder, and you know that they would be sent out there to die for no purpose.
Other than as a kind of blood sacrifice for the satanic elites with their ancestral hatreds of Russia.
Nothing more than that.
So their beef with their ancestral beef is going to be the cause for our children to die.
I mean, I don't want the Ukrainians to die.
I don't want Russians to die.
It's the purest evil.
Absolutely it is.
It's entirely pointless.
There's really no words for how evil it is.
This should never have happened.
And, again, the guilt is really, truly on the West who instigated the coup in the first place.
And not only in Ukraine, but everything, it's all tied together, right?
What they're doing in Syria.
They continue to punish the Syrian people for their crime of not allowing their government to be toppled.
I know.
Respect to the Syrians.
What an incredible people they must be.
Incredible, and they're suffering so hugely now.
The inflation is just out of control.
I'd have to check with Vanessa to see the exchange rate, or the dollar to lira rate now, but people can't afford to live.
It's horrendous, and the West just keeps making it worse for them.
So, I mean, they're capable of incredible cruelty, immense cruelty, endless cruelty.
And they're literally sociopaths, so I don't know, back to your question, I don't know how this is going to end.
And with that, James, I'm really sorry, but not only are my dogs demanding my attention, but I've actually got to get going.
Thank you.
Eva, it's been great.
Well worth the wait.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you.
Go and have a walk with your dogs.
And thank you.
Thank you so much for all you've been doing.
Yeah, well, thank you.
Where can people find your stuff?
Well, I don't know if you have my Telegram channel.
I can send you a link to it.
It's Eva K. Bartlett, Reality Theories.
I have a blog.
I'm not a blogger per se.
I only basically use the blog to republish articles I've written or interviews I've done.
So, best place is really Telegram, but if people are not on Telegram, if they're on Twitter, I'm active there, and also my blog would be good, and my YouTube, yeah.
OK, I'll do that.
And thank you everyone for listening and thank you for watching.
Please carry on supporting me on Locals, on Subscribestar, on BuyMeACoffee, all those various outlets.
I really appreciate your support.
And, you know, there are bad guys against us who want to close people like me and Eva down.
